About

Brief chronology of my work

2000-2004

I grew up in India and have studied and worked in Sweden, Canada and the United States during the last 20 years. My professional training is in the field of population genetics and much of my work is on natural populations of widely distributed forest tree species. My early work focused on conservation genetics of Norway spruce and central marginal hypothesis testing in old and second growth forests of eastern white pine.

2004-2009

In the intervening years before I began my graduate studies, I worked as a research technician with Patrick Abbot at Vanderbilt University. During the course of five years, I learned a great deal about molecular population genetics and social evolution in aphids. I also performed thousands of PCR reactions and genotyped large numbers of aphids and treehoppers using polyacrylamide gels. My participation in this work showed that movement of aphids between galls is not restricted by kinship. Together with Kathleen Grogan, we further developed this work resulting in a publication on the cost of conflict in aphid societies. While at Vanderbilt, I also did a brief stint with Lila Sonica-Krezel working on TILLING, a reverse genetics approach in zebrafish.

It was also during my PhD that I developed the now popular STRUCTURE analysis automation utility - StrAuto which has now been downloaded over 1500 times by scientists in over 50 countries. Parallelization was subsequently implemented by Kevin Emerson. Paper describing StrAuto can be found here.

2014-2016

Working with Steve Keller, I switched gears to go back to my roots in plant evolutionary genetics. With a new and easier to work model system at hand (poplars), I developed understanding of the next generation sequencing and the bioinformatics analysis of this data to address questions in population and evolutionary genomics. Our analysis of hybridization in poplar species at their range margins showed that introgression can be adaptive if it is beneficial for survival in suboptimal conditions. Another thread of work on flowering time gene network in balsam poplar provided greater insights into influence of range position for local adaptation.

2017-18

Between Dec 17 and 18, I was appointed to a study commmittee of the National Academy of Sciences. The committee was convened at the request of various federal agencies and was tasked with investigating the role biotechnology could play in saving forests in the face of various threats. You can read about the study process at the committee’s website: Potential for biotechnology to address forest health. A consensus result based on the committee’s findings was published by the National Academies Press in January 2019. The report is titled Forest Health and Biotechnology: Possibilities and Considerations which can be downloaded for free.

2016-

In the current position, I have developed a number of collaborations in various biological subdisciplines. The following projects are at various stages in data analysis and manuscript preparation:

Detecting novel agents of viral infection in the transcriptome sequences of affected Canidae and Equidae.